The Tender Bar

by J. R. Moehringer

  It didn’t help that my mother and I had no money for clothes, and I was starting to grow. My shirts were too small, my pants were suddenly capris. Floods, the kids called them, pointing, snickering. Hey, Noah-ringer, when’s the Flood? Again, the preoccupation with water.

  What made school especially difficult was my name. JR Moehringer was a handle that begged to be ridiculed. “What’s the matter, JR,” kids would say, “your mom can’t afford more than two letters?” Then they would go to town on Moehringer. They would conjugate my surname like a verb in Spanish class. Homo-ringer. Geronimo-ringer. Lawn-mower-ringer. Remember-the-Alamo-ringer. Each nickname led to another schoolyard fight, though the bloodiest was when a boy simply called me Junior.

  After school I’d hurry home to our latest apartment, which my mother found while I was in Manhasset. It was cheap—$125 a month—because it sat beside a raised canal that ran swift and loud with runoff from the Salt River. I’d lie on our rented sofa, icing my bruises and waiting for my mother to come home. I never did schoolwork. If I felt ambitious I’d work on an endless short story about a boy kidnapped by mutant roadrunners and held captive inside a giant cactus. Mostly I just watched reruns of Adam-12. I could feel myself turning into someone I didn’t recognize, someone I hadn’t expected that I would become. I knew I was barreling toward a cliff, and some days the only thing standing between me and the abyss was Jedd.

  Jedd had been Sheryl’s high-school sweetheart while she lived in Arizona, and it shattered him when she and the cousins bolted back to Manhasset. He still wrote to her and spoke to her on the phone, and he planned to move east and marry her as soon as he graduated from Arizona State. Meanwhile he considered me, her next of kin, the next-best thing, and dropped by the apartment every few days to talk about her.

  I thought Jedd might just be the coolest man alive. He drove an MG convertible, burnt orange, with tan leather seats and a walnut gearshift pocked from his gold signet ring. The MG was shaped like a surfboard, and not much bigger, so when Jedd came flying down the street he looked as though he were shooting a curl above the desert. He was thin, sarcastic, tough, and he smoked Marlboro Reds just like Uncle Charlie. Holding his cigarette rigidly between the second and third fingers of his right hand, Jedd gave the Churchill V sign every time he took a puff. He had a reptilian calm, which he maintained with an intravenous drip of Coors and a regimen of strange stretching exercises. While watching TV Jedd would tug each finger until the knuckle gave a sharp pop. Then he’d twist his head to one side until his neck crackled. After this self-realignment his entire body would go slack, as if he’d released its inner torque.

  As a boy Jedd had done all the standard things with his father—camping, hunting, fishing—and he must have noticed the look on my face when he talked about his adventures, because one day he suggested we go off into the great outdoors.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “You and me. You’re always bitching about how you miss the changing seasons, falling leaves and all that crap. Let’s go north this weekend and look at some snow.”

  When Jedd proposed the trip to my mother, she asked him questions that made me want to dive under our rented sofa. How cold will it get? Should JR bring mittens?

  “Mittens?” I cried.

  She stopped, a look of self-reproach on her face. “Sounds like fun,” she said. “Bring me back a snowball.”

  We left at dawn, in Jedd’s father’s pickup, since the MG wouldn’t hold all our gear and the cooler full of food. Within an hour the flat desert gave way to rugged hills. The air turned cool. Patches of snow appeared along the side of the road, then fields of pure white. Jedd slapped in a cassette of Billy Joel, who reminded him of New York, which reminded him of Sheryl, which gave him cow eyes. “Oh brother,” I said. “Everyone around me is in looove.”

  Jedd slugged me on the shoulder.

  “You miss her too,” he said. “And McGraw. The whole gang. Right?”

  He asked me about Manhasset, his second-favorite subject, after Sheryl. I told him a story I’d heard at Gilgo, about Bobo tending bar wearing nothing but his bathrobe, exposing himself to customers. When someone took offense, a fight broke out, and Fuckembabe got thrown through the window of the Mobil station. I must have had a nostalgic look on my face as I pictured the scene, because Jedd said, “You’ll be back before you know it. We’ll all be in Manhasset soon and we’ll have a big party to celebrate. At Dickens.”

  “It’ll be called Publicans by then,” I said. “Steve is going to renovate. You’ll love it. It’s the greatest bar in the world.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I hang out there all the time.”

  “A shaver like you? In a bar?”

  “Uncle Charlie and the men take me to the beach and to Mets games and afterward I hang out with them at the bar. They let me drink beers and smoke cigarettes and bet on the fish fights they have in the back room. One night my fish won.”

  Jedd grinned at the creativity of my lies.

  We were just south of the Grand Canyon when Jedd threw the wheel hard to the right and bounced the truck onto the shoulder. He yanked the parking brake. It made a crackling sound like his neck. “This looks like a good spot,” he said.

  “For what?”

  “Build a snowman.”

  “How?”

  “How! How and who, that’s all you say. It’s like being with Geronimo and his pet owl. You take a snowball and roll it along the ground until it gets big. It ain’t complicated.”

  In no time we stood face-to-face with a seven-foot man of snow. Jedd gave it quarters for eyes and a hot dog from the cooler for a nose. It looked like Joey D, I told him. Jedd poked a Marlboro into its mouth. “Should we light it?” I asked.

  “Nah. It’ll stunt his growth.”

  I stared at the snowman. The sun bounced off the quarters and made its eyes seem as if they were flashing. I thought Jedd a genius. No—a god. Wasn’t this the first prerequisite of being a god, making a man from nothing?

  “Let’s set up camp here beside Frosty,” Jedd said.

  He pulled the truck into the woods. Beside the truck he spread a blanket, onto which he spilled a bag of screws and stakes and rods, and in minutes a tent billowed up from the ground. Inside he spread sleeping bags, pillows, and a radio. “Chow time,” he said, glancing at the lowering sun. He showed me how to gather wood, how to build a fire, how to cook hot dogs on a stick. We ate on a stump as the woods filled with darkness. I washed down dinner with several Dr Peppers, while Jedd worked his way through a six of Coors. “Beer is amazing,” he said, holding the bottle to my eyes. “Nutritional. Medicinal. A beverage, but also a meal.”

  “Bobo says cold beer on a hot day is reason enough not to commit suicide.”

  “Bobo sounds like a very wise man.”

  After a dessert of roasted marshmallows Jedd taught me how to douse the fire, how to hang leftover food so bears wouldn’t come. He zipped me into my sleeping bag, then sealed up the tent and turned on a radio. “Out here in the middle of nowhere,” he said, “you can pick up stations and ball games from all over the country.” My heart pounded as he turned the dial and we heard voices from Los Angeles and Salt Lake City and Denver. I nearly told him about The Voice, but thought better of it. Instead I told him more about Manhasset. I told him about Steve stealing the cop car and trying to arrest the whole town, and Wilbur riding the trains. I avoided certain topics, like Grandpa’s house. I didn’t want to say anything to discourage Jedd from joining my family. In the middle of my monologue he started to snore. I pulled the radio into my sleeping bag. I couldn’t pass up this opportunity to check for The Voice—but there were too many voices, too many cities. It was frightening and exhilarating at the same time. The sky was full of voices, more voices than stars, and like the stars they always hovered overhead, even when you couldn’t see them.

  Jedd woke me at dawn with a mug of coffee, my first ever. Though I loaded it with sugar and cream, I felt like a true woodsman,
drinking a mug of cowboy coffee by the ashes of our campfire. Jedd fried up a pan of eggs and bacon, and after breakfast he said it was time to head back. As we pulled onto the highway I glanced behind us. The melting snowman looked as if it were slouching, sad to see us go.

  The drive home seemed to take ten minutes. As we descended into the hot desert I felt a lump in my throat. “I hate cactus,” I grumbled.

  “I like them,” Jedd said. “Know why they grow those big arms?”

  “No.”

  He lit a Marlboro. “When a cactus starts leaning to one side,” he said, “it grows an arm on the other side, to right itself. Then, when it starts tipping that way, it grows an arm on the opposite side. And so on. That’s why you see them with eighteen arms. A cactus is always trying to stand up straight. You’ve got to admire anything that tries that hard to keep its balance.”

  I wanted to tell Jedd about my fights in school, my crush on a girl named Helen, my hatred of my name and how no one would talk to me or eat lunch with me because I was new and sounded like a member of the Gambino crime family. I didn’t know why I hadn’t told him these things on the way north or around the campfire. Maybe I hadn’t wanted to remind myself. Maybe I hadn’t wanted to be a drag. Now it was too late. He was pulling up to the canal.

  I invited him in for a Coors. Rain check, he said. He had studying to do. In fact, he said, with finals coming up, he wouldn’t be around for a while. I thanked him for everything and we shook hands. He threw me Billy Joel, saluted, then sped away. Standing in the street, watching his truck spin around the corner, I felt rooted to the ground.

  Over dinner my mother asked me about the trip. I couldn’t speak, and I couldn’t understand why I felt so unbearably sad after having such a good time, and I still couldn’t swallow the lump in my throat. I’d always been prone to a lump in my throat when sad, but nothing like this. I felt as though a pinecone were stuck halfway down. As I continued trying to swallow, as I balled my mashed potatoes into a snowman, my mother got up and sat beside me. “Where’s my snowball?” she asked. Tears flowed down my cheeks. My mother held me while I cried myself out, which I later regretted, because I had nothing left when Sheryl broke up with Jedd soon after that day and he stopped coming around altogether.

  My mother and I were spending several nights each week at Winston’s house, a dress rehearsal for when we became a family. The idea of Winston as my stepfather was daunting. He was no Jedd. He was the opposite of Jedd. Instead of cool, Winston was ice cold. It wasn’t that he disliked me. That might have been fixable. The problem seemed to be that Winston was bored by me.

  At my mother’s urging he tried. He sought me out, engaged me in conversations, looked for places where our interests and personalities might meet. But it was always obvious that he would rather be somewhere else, and inevitably his boredom evolved into resentment, then rivalry. Driving through the desert one day I mentioned to Winston how much I disliked cactuses. I wasn’t sure if I believed Jedd’s defense of the cactus, and I thought it would be interesting to get Winston’s opinion on the same question.

  “Cacti,” he said. “The plural is cacti.”

  “Whatever they’re called,” I said, “I’m sick of them.” Even the high school I was preparing to attend, Saguaro, was named after a cactus.

  “Bet you don’t know how to spell Saguaro,” he said.

  I spelled it for him.

  “Wrong,” he said. “It’s with an h, not a g.”

  I disagreed. Winston insisted. We bet a dollar. When we got to his house he looked up my high school in the phone book, then sulked for an hour.

  Things went rapidly downhill after Winston brought home the sheet from his office football pool. “I never win this thing,” he said.

  “Let me try?”

  “Well! If it isn’t Jimmy the Greek. Think you can do better?”

  He shoved the sheet at me. I looked it over and remembered Uncle Charlie’s many rules. Green Bay never loses at home in December. Kansas City can’t cover a double-digit spread on the road. Washington’s quarterback likes to drink and usually isn’t at his best if the kickoff is early. I filled out the sheet and when my picks won Winston threw the fifty-dollar prize money at me. “Beginner’s luck,” he said, and I heard him say something nastier under his breath as I lateraled the money to my mother.

  Tension ultimately ran so high between me and Winston that I would flee his house, take refuge at a playground up the street, where I would shoot baskets for hours. Invariably Winston would come find me, trailing an air of martyrdom, clearly dispatched by my mother. Basketball bored him almost as much as I did. Football was his game, he said, though he considered placekicking the centerpiece of the sport. While we played H-O-R-S-E he’d regale me with stories of his days as a kicker in college, “winning games single-handedly with my foot.” He considered this phrase the height of wit.

  I don’t remember what finally made Winston snap. He may have noticed me smothering another yawn while he talked about placekicking. He may have felt humiliated after heaving another brick against the rim and losing at H-O-R-S-E yet again. “Let’s you and me play a new game,” he said, bouncing the basketball so hard that it made a scary twanging noise. “Bas-kick-ball.” He had me balance the ball on my toe while he counted ten steps backward and stuck his wet finger in the wind. Then he sprinted toward me and booted my basketball high over the fence, into the desert. “It’s up!” he shouted. “And it’s good!” We watched my basketball bouncing among the cacti like a pinball caroming off bumper cushions. When it struck one cactus flush, the ball exploded.

  Shortly after that day my mother told me that Winston and she were “taking a break.” Her voice was hoarse, like the men from Dickens when Uncle Charlie picked them up in the morning to go to Gilgo. Her hair, I noticed, was no longer pouffy. And she looked exhausted. I didn’t say another word the rest of that morning. While my mother wandered around the apartment, listening to Burt Bacharach, I sat on the bank of the canal, trying to figure out how I felt. I was delighted that I wouldn’t have to deal with Winston anymore, but I was sad, because my mother was heartbroken. I knew that my mother was searching for romantic love, and though I didn’t understand what that was, I suspected it was similar to what I was searching for, a connection of some sort, and I worried that, as much as we cared for each other, loneliness was our true common bond. In the crawl space at Grandpa’s house I’d once found a diary my mother kept when she was fourteen. On the first page she’d written, “Anyone that would dare turn beyond this page, may their conscience, if they have any, bother them the rest of their lives!” Inside was a list of forty-two qualities she hoped to find in a man. My father possessed no more than two and a half, so I understood that my mother had compromised in her first search for love, and that she was trying in her second search to be more careful, for both our sakes. I further understood that her search was hindered by me. I remembered the lightbulb salesman in New York, whom she liked a lot. After meeting me, he suggested I be sent to boarding school in Europe. Immediately. I remembered the mechanic who threw a fit when I introduced McGraw to him as my brother. “I thought you had only one kid,” he told my mother angrily, and he didn’t believe her explanation that I merely considered McGraw a brother. Few men were eager to help raise my father’s son, which reduced my mother’s chances of finding love, and this reality, becoming clearer to me that day on the canal, filled me with guilt. I should have done more to get along with Winston. I should have made him love me. Somehow in my cold war with Winston I’d lost sight of my number one goal—taking care of my mother. Now I was just another man who made her life harder.

  When I went back down to the apartment my mother suggested a movie. “Something to take our minds off things,” she said. She proposed A Star Is Born, and I didn’t complain. I wanted her to feel better and if that meant sitting through a romantic musical I was more than willing to make the sacrifice.

  A sacrifice it was. For two hours Barbra Streisand and
Kris Kristofferson broke up and made up and broke up again, for no apparent reason, until Kristofferson mercifully died. In the end, unbowed, her permed hair prickly as a cactus, Streisand belted out the movie’s theme song, “Evergreen,” as if it were “Amazing Grace.” The lights in the theater came up. I turned to my mother, rolling my eyes, but she was covering hers, and crying. People turned and stared. I tried to comfort her, but she wouldn’t stop. She cried as we left the theater, and cried harder as I opened the door to the Volkswagen for her. I ran around to the other side and got in. She didn’t start the car. We sat and waited for her crying to subside, as if waiting for a monsoon to pass. Handing her one Kleenex after another I remembered what Jedd had said about cacti, how they right themselves, how they are always trying to stand up straight. This was what my mother and I were doing, I decided.

  If only our arms would quit falling off.

  fifteen | BILL AND BUD

  My mother and I weren’t making it on her $160 a week. Even with her second job selling Avon, and my paper route, we were falling short each month, sliding deeper into debt. There was always an unexpected bill, an expense at school, a problem with the Volkswagen. “The T-Bird in New York cooperated with us,” my mother said, scowling at the Volkswagen. “This thing wants to break us.” I’d lie in bed at night, worrying about my mother’s finances, and her fatigue. Other than the short burst brought on by Winston, her energy had never rebounded after the surgery, and I feared she’d eventually grow too tired to work. Would we live in a shelter? Would I have to leave high school and take a job to support us? Getting up in the night for a glass of water I’d find my mother in the kitchen, pecking at her calculator. Just before I started high school in 1978 the calculator won. We filed for bankruptcy.